The Ancient Orient (part II)

The art
of northern Mesopotamia inherits from Babylonian art just as Ninevite
civilization did from Chaldean society. The language which its artists speak is
about the same, for the soil, the sky, and the men are not very different.
Only, with the transformation of the social order and the conditions of life,
Chaldean positivism has become brutality. The priest-savant has given place to
the military chief, who has usurped to his profit and that of his class the
temporary command which his companions in hunting and in battle intrusted to
him. The king, in Assyria, is no longer, as in Egypt, the figurehead and
instrument of the priest; he is the Sar, the temporal and spiritual chief,
obeyed under pain of death. The Assyrian astronomer knows Chaldean science, to
be sure, but his role is limited to compelling the heavenly bodies to voice the
desires and interests of his master. Chaldean star worship, an essentially
naturalistic and positivistic religion, has been transformed with the social
state. The symbols have been personified just as political power was; the sun,
the planets, and fire are now real beings—terrible devourers of men, and the
Sar is their armed hand.

This
Sar is saturated with hereditary vices, deformed, before he comes to reign, by
an autocracy centuries old. He is developed in a frightful solitude by a world
of women, of eunuchs, of slaves, officers, and ministers. Luxury and the weight
of material life have crushed his heart. He is a sadistic beast. He is
enervated with ennui, with indulgence and music, with the smell of slaughter
and of flowers. Men are burned or boiled for his gratification; he is shown
living flesh which is being torn by the whip or cut by iron, and in which
poison is producing lockjaw. His least impulse is expressed by an order to
kill. On the bas-reliefs of Khorsabad and Koujoundjik, we may see him
methodically putting out the eyes of chained prisoners; we may see his soldiers
bowling with decapitated heads. Sennacherib, Sargon, or Assurbanipal orders his
scribes to write on brick: "My war chariots crush men and beasts and the
bodies of my enemies. The monuments which I erect are made of human corpses
from which I have cut the heads and the limbs. I cut off the hands of all those
whom I capture alive."

Suffering
exists in proportion to sensibility. It is possible that the Assyrian people
did not feel the horror of living, since they never felt its real joy as did
the Egyptian crowds, which confided to the granite of the tombs the sweetness
and poetry of their soul. Killing is an intoxication. By dint of seeing blood
flow, by dint of expecting death, one grows to love blood, and everything that
one does in life smells of death. Massacre always; battles, and the military
tide rising or ebbing to carry devastation round about Nineveh or to turn it
back upon the surrounding peoples. Always the swarming of the nameless masses in
putrefaction and misery, in the poisonous vapors of the waters and the
devouring fire of the heavens.

When
this people is not cutting throats or burning buildings, when it is not
decimated by famine and butchery, it has only one function—to build and decorate
palaces whose vertical walls shall be thick enough to protect the Sar, his
wives, his guards, and his slaves—twenty or thirty thousand persons—against the
sun, invasion, or perhaps revolt. Around the great central courts are the
apartments covered with terraces or with domes, with cupolas, images of the
absolute vault of the deserts, which the Oriental soul will rediscover when
Islam shall have reawakened it. Higher than these, observatories which are at
the same time temples, the zigurats,
the pyramidal towers whose stages painted with red, white, blue, brown, black,
silver, and gold, shine afar through the veils of dust which the winds whirl in
spirals. Especially at the approach of evening, the warring hordes and the
nomadic pillagers, who see the somber confines of the desert streaked with this
motionless lightning, must recoil in fear. It is the dwelling of the god, and
resembles those steps of the plateau of Iran leading to the roof of the world,
which are striped with violent colors by subterranean fire and by the blaze of
the sun.

The
gates are guarded by terrific brutes, bulls and lions with human heads,
marching with a heavy step. On the whole length of the interminable walls they
herald the drama which unrolls within—the mythological and living hell, the
slaughter of men in war, the men falling from the tops of towers into the
shower of stones and spears, kings choking lions, the bloody epic whose cruelty
is increased by its mechanical expression. These stiff legs in profile, those
torsos seen in profile or front view, these arms articulated like pincers—all
are resisting, some killing, some dying. And if this life thus formed never
attains that silent rhythm which, in Egypt, communicates to it a character of
such high spirituality, it gives the ferocious bas-reliefs of the palaces of
Nineveh a force so rigorous as to seem to pursue its demonstration by its own
impetus.

It is
by this burst of life, arrested in a few attitudes—conventional but
passionately alive—that all archaisms correspond one with another. Certain
writers have tried, by a too easy process of reasoning, to associate the
ancient forms of art with the attempts of children. The Egyptians and the
Assyrians are supposed to have traced mere sketches of a superior figure, which
was to be realized by the Greeks. As in the images made by children, it is
true, the eye is seen in front view and very wide, illuminating a face in
profile. It is true that the Theban or Ninevite artist satisfied the need for
continuity, which the child also shares with all beings and which is the very
condition of his logical development; he did so in following—untiringly and
willingly—the uninterrupted line of the contours, the definition of the eye by
the edge of the lids, and the profile of the face, whose plane flees and floats
as soon as it is presented in front view. But it is only in decorative
bas-relief or in painting the language of convention—that Egypt and Assyria
reveal this inadequacy of technique—which, however, takes away nothing from the
force of the sentiment and leaves intact the incomparable conception of mass
and of evocative line. Assyrian art and Egyptian art represent a synthetic
effort whose profundity and whose power of intuition are such that it is
puerile to think childhood capable of anything similar. And when the Egyptian
turns to his true means of expression—sculpture—he reveals in it a science
which will never again contain so much ardor and mystery, even if the social
and moral preoccupations of other peoples animate it with a different life,
indeed a freer and more comprehensive life. The art of the old peoples develops
itself within itself; it accepts the fixed limits of the great metaphysical
systems and thus is prevented from expressing the multiple and infinitely
complex relationships between the being in movement and the world in movement.
Only political and religious liberty will break the archaic mold, to reveal to
man, who is already defined in his structure, his place in the universe.

Assyrian
society was particularly far removed from such preoccupations. It was
interested only in adventures of war or of hunting in which the Sar was the
hero. The walls of his palace declare his glory and his strength. No desire to
better life, no moving tenderness. When they did not celebrate a killing they
showed a line of soldiers on the march to a killing. When the Assyrians left
their burning soil to go down to the sea they saw nothing but the effort of the
rowers, they leaned over the waves only to see fish seized by crabs. There was
nothing like this in Egypt, which again and again took refuge in that
concentration of mind which gives a quality of inner life and a mystery to its
art. There is nothing like this even in Chaldea, where we find feminine bodies
outlined in a furtive caress. Amid the incessant wars, the invasions, ruins,
and griefs, the artist had not the time to look within him. He served his
master, and without mental reservations. He followed him in his military
expeditions against Chaldea, against Egypt, against the Hittites, and the
tribes of the high plateaus. In his train he hunts the onager in the plains, or
goes with him to seek the lion in the caverns of the Zagros Mountains. He leads
a violent life, full of movement, and not at all contemplative. He recounts it
with brutality.

Assyrian
art is of a terrible simplicity. Although an almost flat silhouette, one that
is barely shadowed by undulations, alone marks out the form—that form is
bursting with life, movement, force, savage character. One might say that the
sculptor ran a knife over the course of the nerves which carry the murderous
energy to the back, the limbs, and the jaws. The bones and muscles stretch the
skin to the breaking point. Hands clutch paws, close upon necks, and draw the
bowstring; teeth tear, claws rend; the blood spouts thick and black. Only the
human face is without movement. Never does one see its surface light up with
the dull glow of the Egyptian faces. It is altogether exterior, always the
same—hard, closed, very monotonous, but very much characterized by its immense
eyes, its arched nose, its thick mouth, its dead and cruel ensemble. It is meet
that the king, whose head retains its tiara and its oiled, perfumed, and curled
hair and beard, should be calm as he strangles or cuts the throat of the monster,
drunk with fury. It is meet that the details of his costume, as well as those
of his hairdressing, should be minutely described. The poor artist has to
concern himself with pitiful things. He flatters his master, ornaments his
garments, and cares for his weapons and war equipment ; he makes his hair
glossy; he represents him as being impassible and strong in combat, larger than
those who accompany him, dominating without effort the furious beast which he
kills. The terrible character of the breasts, the legs, the arms in action, the
wild animals rushing to the attack with muscles tense, bones cracking, or jaws
grinding, is too often masked by the artist.

What
matter? At that time when a man could not free himself he had to assume his
share of the servitude. The Ninevite artist comprehended—that is, the one
really accessible liberty. He was infinitely stronger than those whose horrible
power he had the weakness to adore. The too elegant, the too courageous Sars
with their royal ornaments and their trappings, bore us, and that is the
revenge of the sculptor. What he loved seizes us—overpowers us. Ask him how he
saw the animals: lean horses with thin legs, nervous, drawn heads, with
throbbing nostrils; ask him to show you the growling dogs as they pull at their
chains, or the bristling lions, or the great birds run through by arrows and
falling among the trees. There he is incomparable, superior to all before and
after him, Egyptians, Aegeans, Greeks, Hindoos, Chinese, Japanese, the Gothic
image makers, and the men of the Renaissance in France or in Italy. Under the
palm trees with their rough-skinned fruits he has surprised the beast at rest,
its muzzle resting on its paws as it digests the blood it has drunk. He has
seen the beast in combat, tearing flesh, opening bellies, mad with hunger and
rage. The forces of instinct circulate with blind violence in these contracted
muscles, these beasts falling heavily on the prey, these bodies raised upright,
with limbs apart and open claws, in these wrinkling muzzles, these irresistible
springs, and these death struggles as ferocious as leaps or victories. Never
will uncompromising description go farther. Here a lion vomits blood because
his lungs are run through by a spear. There a lioness in fury, her teeth and claws
out, drags toward the hunter her body paralyzed by the arrows that have pierced
the marrow of her spine. They are still terrible when dead, lying on their
backs, with their great paws falling idly. It is the poem of strength, of
murder, and of hunger.

Even
when he puts aside for a day his subjects of battle or the chase, his orgies of
murder in the horrible chorus of death clamors and roars, the Assyrian sculptor
continues his poem. Almost as well as the sphinxes of the sacred alleys of
Egypt, the violent monsters who guard the gates give that impression of animal
unity which makes the strangest creations of our imagination re-enter the order
of nature. But the statue maker of Nineveh is not content with fixing an
eagle's head on the shoulders of a man, a man's head on the neck of a bull. The
bull, the lion, the eagle, and the man are merged; we get the body or claws of
a lion, the hoofs or breast of a bull, the wings or claws of an eagle, the hard
head of a man, with his long hair, beard, and high tiara. Man and lion, eagle
and bull, the being has always the potentiality of life; in its brutal and
tense harmony it fulfills its symbolic function, and its violent synthesis of
the natural forms represents to our eyes the power of the armed animal. As in
Egypt, the head of the monster is generally human—an obscure and magnificent
homage rendered by the man of violence to the law which man bears essentially
within him, the law which says that blind force is to be overcome by the force
of the mind.